This is horrifying... but oh, so , captalistic

[Glocksman]

Speaking from my experience only, both my family's purchase of my mother's plot and my own purchase of a plot for myself are good for perpetuity.

Knowing beforehand that the purchase was for a limited amount of time would go a long ways towards quenching the understandable rage most people would feel upon learning their loved ones had been dug up and buried in a mass grave after they'd paid for burial in a particular plot of ground.

Frankly the idea of some asshole disinterring Mother in order to resell her plot only makes me slightly less angry than if they'd tried to sell her body to a necrophiliac.

Internet Tough Guy posturing aside, you wouldn't want to be nearby if I'd learned the people in question had treated my mother's grave that way.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Emmett Till's casket left rotting

Exclusive: Emmett Till's casket left to waste at Burr Oak
Cemetery debacle grows worse with discovery of coffin of civil rights icon
Comments

July 10, 2009

BY MARY MITCHELL Sun-Times Columnist

Broken. Rusted. Battered. The image of a glass-covered casket with the body of Emmett Till was shown around the world in the 1950s. But on Thursday, as hundreds of African Americans searched frantically for the graves of love ones, the battered casket of Till was rusting in the back of a shack at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip.

The casket was surrounded by garbage and discarded headstones strewn about like litter.

"When we opened it up trying to find what we have, a family of possums ran out," said Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart.

Cemetery workers had been cooperative and informed law enforcement officials that it was indeed Till's original casket.

"It sure looks like all of the photos I have ever seen," Dart said. "This is absolutely horrible."

In June 2005, Till's body was exhumed during an investigation of his death. As is customary, he was not reburied in the same casket.

The original casket was supposed to be part of a planned memorial for Till at Burr Oak Cemetery, but the donations for that memorial were allegedly pocketed by a woman who has been charged in this ghoulish scheme.

Till, 14, was kidnapped and murdered after he whistled at a white woman in 1955 in Mississippi. The lynching of the Chicago youth helped spark the civil rights movement. A picture of his severely mutilated face was shown around the world.

His original casket is symbolic of the condition of the battered condition of the cemetery.

Officers raided the cemetery at 4400 W. 127th St. in Alsip on Wednesday morning.

Four people, including Carolyn Towns -- the woman who was supposed to set up the Till memorial -- were charged with one count of dismemberment of a human body.

The other charged employees were Keith Nicks, 45; Terrence Nicks, 39, and Maurice Dailey, 59.

Throughout the day, Cook County sheriff's deputies ferried anxious family members to grave sites in buses ordinarily used to take inmates to Cook County Jail.

The landscape in some sections of the cemetery was dotted with orange utility flags that some people mistakenly thought indicated desecrated graves.

But beyond the grassy areas at Burr Oak, hidden by a wall of high weeds and buried under mounds of dirt, is the nightmare that all of these African Americans were praying they were spared.

The Cook County sheriff's office now estimates that about 300 bodies were dumped in the rear of Burr Oak, in an area that is about the size of three football fields.

Knowing what was out there was a heavy burden etched in the faces of the people who were waiting for answers.

Carolyn Singleton of Chicago sat in a folding chair outside of the cemetery's office building, where people were lined up seeking information about plot locations.

She had arrived at Burr Oak at 11 a.m. It was about 3 p.m., and she was still clutching No. 379.

Singleton told me she was looking for the grave sites of seven family members: her grandmother, two aunts, two uncles, a cousin, and her fiance's mother.

"This is like having a funeral all over again," she said. "My fiance's family is calling from out of town trying to get information. All this is giving me a headache."

I have to give Dart credit for the way he has handled this unprecedented catastrophe.

Although the cemetery's owners said they would attend a news conference at the cemetery, they failed to show. With most of the employees under arrest, the Cook County Sheriff 's Department is essentially running the cemetery.

Sheriff's deputies drove worried families back and forth to sections of the cemetery to look for plots.

Armed detectives took information from distraught people who either could not find their loved one's grave site or discovered something was amiss.

Other employees with the Cook County sheriff's office passed out cold bottled water and even emptied garbage containers.

Although the process for locating plots was indeed slow, people were unbelievably patient, and sheriff's deputies were sensitive.

The Rev. Steve Jones, a chaplain for the sheriff's office and president of the Baptist Pastors Conference, was one of the people driving distressed survivors to grave sites.

Jones was thankful that Dart advised the clergy about the disaster before going public. He believes that decision helped bring an element of dignity to a situation that could have been chaotic.

"It wouldn't have been fair to exclude funeral homes or fair to pastors, not to be prepared for a catastrophe of this magnitude," Jones said.

"The fact is every black person in Chicago has a tie to this cemetery. When they took us to the crime scene, I walked over bones," he said.

"This whole thing makes the bereavement experience fresh. To even think your loved one's remains might not be in place. . . it really breaks my heart."

And perhaps a very long punishment is unnecessary, however let us remember that the mortal remains of people are all their families have left. There is no reunification in heaven, no afterlife, no paradise or hell, and to me, that makes ceremony over burials and reverence for the bodies of the deceased all the more important, not less, as they are literally the absolute and terminal physical remains of once sapient individuals.

[Broomstick]

I'm a bit confused. Before this all came to light, what were people told when they came to visit the graves of loved ones who had been dug up? I know they targeted mostly old graves that nobody visited, but with all the people now searching and unable to find the graves of relatives, it seems obvious that some newer graves were hit too.

Burr Oak has, among other things, drainage problems and has been hit hard by flooding in the past few years. It wouldn't surprise me if people were told that a section was flooded and unsafe to enter when really what was happening was someone trying to hide this.

It has come to light that some people HAD reported missing graves over the past year, and that along with the cemetery owners and employees that were not involved in the scheme coming forward was what prompted this investigation.

That said, I don't think these guys should be sentenced as harshly as murderers. They were horribly selfish and reckless but they're entire plan seems to have rested on the hope that no one would notice and therefore no one would care or be harmed by their actions. They should certainly go to jail for a long time, but it doesn't seem right to me that murderers don't always get life in prison but these guys likely will.

Actually, some murderers are executed, not just put in jail, and as horrible as this is grave robbing is not a capital crime.

Regardless, the courts will handle the matter now. Doing bad things to dead people usually is not punished as harshly as crimes towards the living, but in this case there has certainly been a great deal of emotional hurt among the living.

The idea of segregated cemeteries shouldn't surprise me, but from what I can gather, the cemetery only dates back to the late-19th century - where were burials held before then? Out in the countryside?

I've been trying to find a date for when Burr Oak was established, but right now searches involving "Burr Oak Cemetery" turn up a gazillion current news stories or sites that say they're overloaded due to traffic involving that term. As I mentioned, I think the cemetery is significantly older that 1880 but I just don't have a firm date.

Prior to the establishment of Burr Oak burials probably took place either on private land, or very small church-owned graveyards, many of which still dot the area.

Also, Broomstick, I'm not sure if the practice exists in the US (by your reaction, I'd wager it doesn't), but in Europe it is customary to only lease a burial plot for a few decades and then exhume the body to be put away in an ossuary and make room for a new burial. Now, of course there is an unimaginable leap between this practice, which is done with proper respect and full knowledge of the family, and what has happened in this incident, but it might explain why Starglider seems a bit glib.

I had forgotten about that European custom. You are correct, it does not exist in the US for the most part. When you buy a grave here it's supposed to be forever. It would not surprise me to find that there are some locations where a gravesite in the US is not permanent, particularly in the east, but in such cases it would have to be stated at the time of sale that such was the case, and final disposition of the remain would have to be detailed in advance.

Now, there are means of either opening or moving a grave legally in the US, but there is a definite process to go through which clearly was not done here. There are even circumstances where a grave can be removed against the wishes of the relatives but it's pretty uncommon and, again, there is a process to go through. Certainly, discarding bones in a heap is NOT part of that process, human remains are to be treated with a certain respect that is entirely absent here.

Yes, we are in a sense "just meat", but it's special meat nonetheless. There are people who don't care about it but they're the exception. Both in custom and in law human remains are to be treated as special and certainly not as trash.

[Enigma]

<snip>
That said, I don't think these guys should be sentenced as harshly as murderers. They were horribly selfish and reckless but they're entire plan seems to have rested on the hope that no one would notice and therefore no one would care or be harmed by their actions. They should certainly go to jail for a long time, but it doesn't seem right to me that murderers don't always get life in prison but these guys likely will.

Then what do you think of Bernie Madoff's 150 year sentence for his ponzi scheme? All he did was take money from people and he didn't mess with graves. The people mentioned in the OP article while took in less money but destroyed graves. Which is worse?

[Atlan]

<snip>
That said, I don't think these guys should be sentenced as harshly as murderers. They were horribly selfish and reckless but they're entire plan seems to have rested on the hope that no one would notice and therefore no one would care or be harmed by their actions. They should certainly go to jail for a long time, but it doesn't seem right to me that murderers don't always get life in prison but these guys likely will.

Then what do you think of Bernie Madoff's 150 year sentence for his ponzi scheme? All he did was take money from people and he didn't mess with graves. The people mentioned in the OP article while took in less money but destroyed graves. Which is worse?

I'd think Madoff's sentence was fully deserved, and the individuals here should get lesser (but still harsh) sentences.
The difference being that Madoff literally ruined living people. Horrifying as what these desecrators did is, logically (and yes, I DO understand that for a lot of people logic has left the building), it is on a different scale than the misery and damage that Madoff did to his victims.
Having said that, It's allways difficult to put legal value on emotional suffering, AND I'm from the Netherlands, where just about the only permanent burial plots are Jewish. Almost all others are leased, and exhumed after a certain amount of time. This tends to tinge my view on this too. Still, it's a fucking heinous thing to do.

[Patrick Degan]

Also, Broomstick, I'm not sure if the practice exists in the US (by your reaction, I'd wager it doesn't), but in Europe it is customary to only lease a burial plot for a few decades and then exhume the body to be put away in an ossuary and make room for a new burial. Now, of course there is an unimaginable leap between this practice, which is done with proper respect and full knowledge of the family, and what has happened in this incident, but it might explain why Starglider seems a bit glib.

The practise does —or did— exist in New Orleans from colonial times. I'm not certain it still does today, since new cemeteries have been commissioned from the 60s onward so it may have ceased. But for most of its history, the dead in New Orleans were also, after a few decades, removed from their vaults and put in an ossuary within the family or society tomb to make room for new occupants. With limited land space and below-ground burials unavailable (due to the high water-table), it was the only practicable option for the city.

[LadyTevar]

Now, there are means of either opening or moving a grave legally in the US, but there is a definite process to go through which clearly was not done here. There are even circumstances where a grave can be removed against the wishes of the relatives but it's pretty uncommon and, again, there is a process to go through. Certainly, discarding bones in a heap is NOT part of that process, human remains are to be treated with a certain respect that is entirely absent here.

Yes, we are in a sense "just meat", but it's special meat nonetheless. There are people who don't care about it but they're the exception. Both in custom and in law human remains are to be treated as special and certainly not as trash.

In West Virginia, before a grave is exhumed for any reason, a Disinternment/ReInternment permit must be sent to the WV State Registrar's Office. The permit must state exactly who is being removed from what plot in what graveyard for what reason and what they will be doing with the body. It must also state if the body is being moved and detail where it's being moved to by cemetery name and plot number.
It must be signed by the Funeral Director in charge of the Disinternment, witnessed by the family member requesting the Disinternment, and then signed by the State Registrar before the funeral home can even consider bringing a shovel into that cemetery.

THAT is how it's supposed to be done. Bodies are not supposed to be dug up and thrown into a heap at the foot of a hill like a garbage dump. Bodies are to be handled reverently, with due respect to the living relatives.

Yes, this is getting a LOT of discussion at work and amongst the Funeral Homes in my state.

[MKSheppard]

It's Chicago. What do you expect? This is why corruption must be fought at all levels to keep it down -- because a culture of corruption at the top can pervade down to the lowest levels; as people figure "if the boss is getting his cut, why can't I?"

[Broomstick]

Just quick update: Cook County Sheriff's office reports that there are over 100,000 graves at Burr Oak cemetery. At least 50,000 are unmarked. Wow, what a mess!